1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printer driver, a storage medium, and an information processing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, various suggestions are made on a computer environment of an office to improve an efficiency of a work.
Accordingly, it has been increasingly requested to customize and sell an image forming apparatus including a printer, a multifunction product, or the like in such a manner that only necessary functions may be utilized. Therefore, a printer to which a function as a plug-in may be added has been developed. When a function is added to a printer as a plug-in, it is also necessary to expand the function of a printer driver that controls the printer in such a manner that an additional function may be used.
Furthermore, even when a function is not added to a printer, there is a need of expanding a function to a single piece of printer driver.
However, when the function of a printer driver is expanded, it is usually necessary to recompile the printer driver and reinstall it in a customer environment. Such a procedure deteriorates the convenience of a user.
Therefore, when the function of a printer driver is expanded, a technology for adding the function to the printer driver as a plug-in without recompilation and reinstallation has been proposed.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2004-005608 discloses a technology for making a device driver have a means for detecting the addition of plug-in and informing the detected plug-in of an event transmitted from an operating system to expand a function. As a result, dynamic expansion of the function of the printer driver is made possible without recompiling the device driver.
However, when a new function is added as a plug-in in a conventional technology including Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2004-005608, a lot of processes such as the display of screen, the saving of setting, the control of print, and the like should be performed to realize the function. However, it is difficult to use the existing processing unit of the printer driver to perform these processes. Therefore, there is a problem in that the conventional technology requires a high development cost because a plug-in should be developed to realize all the processes.